Treo 600

Although the phone is relatively small - measuring 11.2 x 6.0 x 2.2 cm - it is surprisingly heavy, weighing in at 168 grams. This is still light enough to carry in your pocket, and the device comes with a carry pouch that attaches to your belt included in the box.

The layout of the phone is well designed, and dominated by a 160 by 160 pixel 3375 colour touch screen, with the stylus packed away neatly in the back of the device. The screen looks quite good, but has a lower resolution than other high-end mobiles and PDAs. Beneath the screen is a five-way navigation key, which is used to move around the various menus in the phone.

On either side of this are four dedicated hotkeys: phone, calendar, messages and a button to lock the phone. The key to bring up all the applications is a button with a house on it located at the bottom of the phone, which took a bit of getting used to. Beside that is a button labelled 'menu', which brings up the menu of whatever screen you are on at the time.

One of the major selling features of the Treo 600 is the Qwerty keyboard on the phone. PalmOne claim a lot of research went into designing the buttons to make them small yet easy to press. We found the keyboard to be one of the most comfortable and easy-to-use of all the PDA/Mobile phones we've tried so far. The keyboard includes a shift key as well an 'option' key, which toggles between the letters and the symbols included on the buttons.

The keyboard has 10 keys shaded blue in the shape of a typical number pad, and this is used when dialling a phone number. We found this much easier than having the numbers across the top of the keyboard, which is how they are normally displayed.

The volume buttons are on the side of the device, with the power button on the top. There is also a switch to turn the Treo 600 into silent mode, which we think is better than going in through the menu. There is also an SD slot (or other multimedia card) at the top of the phone, and a slot for the SIM card. This means you don't need to remove the battery to change or take out the SIM card, which is a sensible move.

The messaging on the Treo 600 is easy to use. The keyboard makes typing messages easy, once you get used to using two thumbs, and the phone will link five SMS's together to allow you to write up to 650 characters. The phone has a QuickText feature, which allows you to pre-write up to four lines of text, and a little button that allows you to insert smilies. We suspect these smilies might be displayed graphically on other Palm devices, but on normal phones they transform into the text based version.

Multimedia messages are also fun to play around with. In addition to adding images and sound to the message, which you would expect as standard, the Treo 600 allows you to edit the images using the stylus on the touch screen. The editing consists solely of basic graffiti and the ability to erase parts of the image, but it's still a lot of fun. However, it does cause the image to reduce in size.

The camera in the phone takes pictures of 640 x 480 pixels (0.3 megapixels), and has automatic light balancing. This is useful because the images retain reasonable quality in a wide range of light conditions. The Treo 600 displays its storage power here, with space for over 500 images.

For the last of the phone aspects of the Treo 600, it has the capability to play 16 channel MIDI polyphonic ringtones and is advertised as having 6 hrs talk time and up to 240 standby time. It's also quad-band, operation in the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz ranges. The device also has IR connectivity.

From the PDA side the Treo 600 stacks up well against its opponents. It runs Palm OS 5.2 on a 144 MHz ARM processor with 32 Mb of RAM. Naturally, the storage can be increased using SD cards.

The PDA functionality will depend on which programs you load up, but there are some interesting ones included. The calculator is impressive, with several different math versions to choose from including trigonometry and logic - which uses hexadecimal.

The phone also includes a calendar, e-mail function, world time program, memo pad, and Splash branded contact, money manager and shopping manager programs, among others. The games that came with the review handset included a version of solitaire and Zap, a space fighter shoot 'em game.

Palmone refused to release a recommended retail price, but the going rate seems to be around AU$1,299. This puts it high in the high-end range for a mobile phone, but might be worth the investment for road-warriors. The sleek form-factor (for a PDA/mobile phone hybrid) and space for applications make the Treo 600 a reasonable business tool.

Treo 600
Company: PalmOne
Price: AU$1299
Distributor:  Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 302 959